Vatican, The Met piece together faith and fashion in new exhibit

By CAROL GLATZ |
Catholic News Service

3/07/18

Guests look at the tiara of Pope Pius IX as they arrive for a press presentation for the exhibit, "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination," at Galleria Colonna in Rome Feb. 26. PAUL HARING | CNS

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, speaks during a press presentation for the exhibit, "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination," at Galleria Colonna in Rome Feb. 26. PAUL HARING | CNS

The mitre of Pope Pius XI is displayed during a press presentation for the exhibit, "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination," at Galleria Colonna in Rome Feb. 26. PAUL HARING | CNS

The tiara of Pope Pius IX is seen during a press presentation for the exhibit, "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination," at Galleria Colonna in Rome Feb. 26. PAUL HARING | CNS

VATICAN CITY — When Pope Benedict XVI's custom-made red leather
loafers became a signature part of his wardrobe after his election in 2005,
Newsweek labeled him "a religious-fashion icon" and Esquire named him "Accessorizer of the Year."

While some critics saw the media's sudden fixation on papal
fashion as frivolous and a way of trivializing the true meaning behind elegance
in ecclesial dress, one top art curator said he saw this spotlight as actually
raising "deeper, more profound considerations — namely, the role that
dress plays in the Catholic Church and the role that the Catholic Church
plays" within the world of fashion's imagination.

Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Metropolitan Museums of Art's
Costume Institute in New York, has now, more than a decade later, turned those
considerations into its most extensive exhibition ever.

The exhibit, "Heavenly Bodies. Fashion and the Catholic
Imagination," includes more than 100 pieces from top designers inspired by
Catholic symbolism and art, as well as 40 vestments and accoutrements from the
papal office of liturgical celebrations. The exhibit will be spread over three
locations in Manhattan May 10-Oct. 8, making it "a veritable
pilgrimage" for visitors and disciples of faith and fashion, said Carrie
Rebora Barratt, the museum's deputy director, at a press preview in Rome Feb.
26.

"Some might consider fashion to be an unfitting or unseemly
medium by which to engage with ideas about the sacred or the divine,"
Bolton said at the preview, which was held in the gilded halls of the Colonna
palace — home of an Italian noble family that produced one pope and a number of
cardinals and religious.

Surrounded by statues, frescoes, tapestries and paintings of
biblical or bucolic scenes, Bolton said, "dress is central to any
discussion about religion."

While religious wear and fashion are two distinct worlds, he said
they are both "inherently performative" when it comes to the ritual
of runway shows or the rite of a liturgy. And they both utilize "visual
language" or "subtle visual codes" that often indicate, for
example, the wearer's identity, function or position within a hierarchy or
social status, he said.

Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue and a
trustee of the museum, told reporters that "part of the power of the
Catholic Church has been how they look and how they dress," referring in
part to the triple-tiered papal tiaras covered with gold and precious gems on
display.

"I mean, they have this extraordinary presence," said
Wintour, whose ankle-length black and scarlet velvet dress with tunic collar
subtly coordinated with the black and scarlet cardinal clothes of Cardinal
Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

The cardinal, who wrote the introduction to the exhibit's
catalogue, was the perfect choice to be a kind of mediator between and
interpreter of faith and fashion. He studied, taught and worked for many years
in Milan, Italy's fashion capital, and as head of the culture council, he has
developed numerous initiatives and networks fostering dialogue and cooperation
between the church and the world of culture and the arts.

God is not just the Creator, he said at the press preview, he is
also "a tailor" as seen in the Genesis account of how the Lord made
Adam and Eve, recently banished from Eden, "garments of skin."

Clothing carries with it not just the essential task of providing
needed covering or protection from the elements, it can also carry social,
cultural, moral and even spiritual and sacred meaning.

For example, liturgical vestments and ornaments are often
crafted, Cardinal Ravasi said, to exalt a kind of "richness" and
opulence so it stands out from the everyday and the merely functional.

The ornate represents "the transcendent, religious
mystery" because the divine is "splendid, marvelous, sumptuous, glorious,"
he said.

However, the cardinal wrote in the catalogue's introduction,
there is risk of the superficial — satirized in Federico Fellini's film, Roma,
which depicted an absurd and "grotesque runway show of clerical
fashions."

Jesus admonished against purely external shows of observance and
criticized worshipers who "lengthen their tassels" just for the sake
of appearances, the cardinal wrote.

Pope Pius XII initiated modern dress reforms in 1952 by snipping
cardinals' nine-foot trains in half — making footmen trailing behind, reams of
fabric in hand, a remnant of the past.

But it was Blessed Paul VI who launched a major reform of
clerical attire in keeping with the pursuit of simplification in the spirit of
the Second Vatican Council.

Pope Paul was the first to ditch the papal tiara as a sign that
his authority did not come from earthly power and that he did not want earthly
glory. He also reduced the height of the miter, stopped giving new cardinals
wide-brimmed scarlet hats and ornate sapphire-studded rings, and asked
cardinals, bishops and other prelates to bid goodbye to red shoes and silver
buckles.

Many see Pope Francis' simpler sartorial style as also
reminiscent of this desire to shed the superficial in pursuit of the essentials
of inner conversion.

Ornate liturgical vestments, in fact, are meant to symbolize not
the love of fashion, but the spiritual transformation of the person in putting
on "the new clothes of Christ," according to an article in the
Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, in 2008.

"The pope, in short, does not wear Prada, but Christ,"
the newspaper said, writing in response to popular media misrepresentations.

Even the push for simplification should have limits, Cardinal
Ravasi said, because liturgical dress should help people lift their eyes,
hearts and minds to the transcendent.

An example, he said, are the beautiful chasubles Henri Matisse
designed, which are now in the Vatican Museums.

When Pablo Picasso saw the designs, he said, "These aren't
sacred vestments, they are butterflies that fly in the sky of God."
Cardinal Ravasi said.